So Long Ordinary

Can you spot the white girl in the photo below? I'm standing in line at a little bakery supply shop on a back alley in downtown Salatiga. Believe it or not, they have a somewhat passable version of chocolate chips there in that little hole-in-the-wall back alley store. (Now there's a sentence you never expect to type in your life.) I wish Sean could have captured the smells and sounds here...this is right behind the major meat market in town. It's a downright "ripe" part of town. Somebody showed me where this little shop is on one of my first trips to the downtown area - only she took me first through the street market and up the stairs and through the meat market and back down the back steps into this alley. I didn't know how to get back to this spot except by retracing our steps all the way through the bloody, stinky meat market until just recently. Whew! I'm so glad I know now how to avoid that unpleasant walk through bloody aisles! The things I...

We're getting ready to head out on our trip! We leave our house Tuesday afternoon and will spend the night in a nearby city before catching our flight at 6 a.m. Wednesday. We are SO excited! We've been Christmas programming like crazy around here. I wish I could promise great pictures or video but the internet isn't cooperating. I have video of Brooklyn's program that I can't get to upload and the pictures I got of Maddie's program are on my phone...but I don't have a cord to download them with. Technology is great. Sorry. I made fudge the other day and we had quite a bit left over. We had easily three or four candy bars' worth of pure chocolate in our fridge. Sean and I snuck out for some Christmas shopping today and left Maddie and Paige at home with our helpers. The fudge is gone . Not a smidgen to be found. Christmas shopping this year has been the pits. I wish I would have thought ahead better and ordered some things to be shipped to us lo...

On Saturday we had our MAF get-together here in Salatiga. It was a blessed time of worship, food, and fellowship! Our crew here is big, as you can see! There are currently seven MAF families here (one of the families is not pictured below). All of these families are studying the Indonesian language. We represent the East Coast of the U.S., the West Coast, the Midwest, Canada, Phillipines, and Holland. All of these families will move on to bases all over Indonesia to serve with MAF. We love these people! (photo courtesy of Glenda Kamphorst)

A six-dollar fake tree that resembles Charlie Brown's + cheap, glittery ornaments made of styrofoam + a few new Christmas albums - Christmas lights because we haven't had time to find them = Christmas cheer! That sounds sarcastic but REALLY it does! Christmas is a little different this year without our usual decorations or extended family or the same traditions that we're used to. It's not snowing outside (but it is raining). There aren't many places to do Christmas shopping and only a small selection of Christmas decorations. So, we make do. Maybe it is better this way, though. It gives us a chance to reflect on the real reason we celebrate this holiday anyway. Jesus. God with us, here on earth, born a lowly child in a humble manger. Living here, the very idea of such a thing strikes me as miraculous, extra-ordinary, awesome . And it is.

We've been hearing about this tasty treat called butu for several months but we hadn't yet had a chance to try it. Finally, we heard the whistle of the butu man and ran out the door to catch him! He pulled his little cart over onto our driveway to fix us the treat with his special little steaming box thingamajig. More customers quickly flocked to him to purchase the treat as well. Butu is basically a round chunk of rice steamed together with red coconut sugar and sprinkled with fresh shaved coconut. And it is delicious. The End.

On December 14, 2008, we welcomed our precious Paige Abigail to the family. Life hasn't been dull since! She was a precious newborn, whose cries (rare as they were) sounded like kitten meows. Though you'd never know it now, Paige was the most easy-going baby ever. Angelic. She was our Christmas Angel Baby. She's still our Christmas Angel Baby, but she's also, apparently, human. She is turning two you know. Oh my goodness is she ever turning two. Paige was born just after we returned to Colorado. She was the best Christmas gift I'd ever received (still is). And she had such soft cheeks. That's what I remember most about her little newborn self - those sweet, soft kissable cheeks that I wanted never to forget. And I haven't. I miss them so. It'd be safe to say that we all adore her...although it would also be honest to say that sometimes certain big sisters aren't so sure. (Look at Maddie's face!) Paige Abigail, how did you get to be...

I'm sorry I'm not a better blogger these days. I want to be, I really do. ACK! It's too busy around here. And it won't exactly be letting up, either. So here's the synopsis of recent days and days to come.... Last Tuesday was a holiday here in Indonesia so we were off from school. We decided to take our girls to the nearest movie theater (1.5 hours away) to see "Tangled." That day turned into our own version of "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles." Only our day included harrowing rides on scooters, buses, and taxis! Actually, the adventure of getting to the theater was part of the fun and everything went far more smoothly than could have been expected. And the girls LOVED the movie - we all did! We had a Christmas party on Friday at our language school. It was a fun event - can you believe we completely forgot the camera? Something about trying to get five people and three pizzas to the school on one scooter in the pouring rain, made it ...

She's seven. She's a reader. ( Be still my bookworm heart.) She's responsible. She's friendly and kind. She's growing and changing by the day. She's beautiful. She adores animals. She loves wearing dresses. She can brush her own hair now. I love her so.

It's no secret that Indonesians don't do dairy. They have no use for it and, frankly, most of them think we're off our rockers for "needing" it. After tasting all the dairy options here (from milk to cheese to everything else) I'm beginning to see their point. We've yet to discover a milk option that we can stomach. No Jersey cows grazing happily in green fields here. We've tried fresh milk from the cow. I don't mean milk from Bessie. I mean some strange, unknown species of cow that stands in a stanchion eating nutrition-less jungle grass all day. That milk didn't taste bad, but not great either and it was a lot of work for us when we got it - boiling, cooling, skimming. Half the time we'd forget we'd put it on to boil and we'd ruin the whole batch. And then sometimes we'd just get a bad batch. There is nothing quite as horrible as three liters of curdled milk. We've tried powdered milk. Ew. Ew. and Ew. We've tried ...